A clarification: We would not post roles if we thought they were net harmful and were hoping that somebody would counterfactually do less harm. I think that would be too morally fraught to propose to a stranger.
Relatedly, we would not post a job where we thought that to have a positive impact, you’d have to do the job badly.
We might post roles if we thought the average entrant would make the world worse, but a job board user would make the world better (due to the EA context our applicants typically have!). No cases of this come to mind immediately though. We post our jobs because we consider them promising opportunities to have a positive impact in the world, and expect job board users to do even more good than the average person.
Conor—yes, I understand that you’re making judgment calls about what’s likely to be net harmful versus helpful.
But your judgment calls seem to assume—implicitly or explicitly—that ASI alignment and control are possible, eventually, at least in principle.
Why do you assume that it’s possible, at all, to achieve reliable long-term alignment of ASI agents? I see no serious reason to think that it is possible. And I’ve never seen a single serious thinker make a principled argument that long-term ASI alignment with human values is, in fact, possible.
And if ASI alignment isn’t possible, then all AI ‘safety research’ at AI companies aiming to build ASI is, in fact, just safety-washing. And it all increases X risk by giving a false sense of security, and encouraging capabilities development.
So, IMHO, 80k Hours should re-assess what it’s doing by posting these ads for jobs inside AI companies—which are arguably the most dangerous organizations in human history.
A clarification: We would not post roles if we thought they were net harmful and were hoping that somebody would counterfactually do less harm. I think that would be too morally fraught to propose to a stranger.
Relatedly, we would not post a job where we thought that to have a positive impact, you’d have to do the job badly.
We might post roles if we thought the average entrant would make the world worse, but a job board user would make the world better (due to the EA context our applicants typically have!). No cases of this come to mind immediately though. We post our jobs because we consider them promising opportunities to have a positive impact in the world, and expect job board users to do even more good than the average person.
Conor—yes, I understand that you’re making judgment calls about what’s likely to be net harmful versus helpful.
But your judgment calls seem to assume—implicitly or explicitly—that ASI alignment and control are possible, eventually, at least in principle.
Why do you assume that it’s possible, at all, to achieve reliable long-term alignment of ASI agents? I see no serious reason to think that it is possible. And I’ve never seen a single serious thinker make a principled argument that long-term ASI alignment with human values is, in fact, possible.
And if ASI alignment isn’t possible, then all AI ‘safety research’ at AI companies aiming to build ASI is, in fact, just safety-washing. And it all increases X risk by giving a false sense of security, and encouraging capabilities development.
So, IMHO, 80k Hours should re-assess what it’s doing by posting these ads for jobs inside AI companies—which are arguably the most dangerous organizations in human history.